A biography for Wislawa Szymborskahasn’t been written yet.
“Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.”
“Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.”
“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
“I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.”
“Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.”
“I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.”
“Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.”
“Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.”
“You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.”
“In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.”
“Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.”
“Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.”
“You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.”
“Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.”
“Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.”
“Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
“This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.”
“All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.”
“There's simply too much fuss about myself.”
“All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.”